Florence Nightingale, who lived from 1820 to 1910, was a statistician and the founder of modern nursing practice. Many people know of her as, "The Lady With the Lamp," as she would carry a lamp while making nighttime rounds to tend to wounded soldiers. Several works of art depicting such a scene have been created, popularizing her image to this day. During the Crimean War, Nightingale worked in Turkey as a manager of British nurses....

Florence Nightingale, who lived from 1820 to 1910, was a statistician and the founder of modern nursing practice. Many people know of her as, "The Lady With the Lamp," as she would carry a lamp while making nighttime rounds to tend to wounded soldiers. Several works of art depicting such a scene have been created, popularizing her image to this day. During the Crimean War, Nightingale worked in Turkey as a manager of British nurses. Nightingale had arrived to find the medical care for soldiers in a terrible state. She totally restructured the medical care being offered there, establishing very high standards of bodily and mental care. Her reforms and precise record-keeping helped lower the mortality rates dramatically, and it is for this that she was upheld as a hero of Victorian society.

After her work in Turkey, Florence founded the first secular school of nursing in London. Nurses trained here learned to follow Nightingale's rigorous and organized methods. She also published several books on nursing, but in her later life was quite poor due to an illness she contracted during the Crimean War.